10 Illustrations of How Fresh Content May Influence Google Rankings&nbsp(Updated)

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

[Estimated read time: 11 minutes]

How fresh is this article?

Through patent filings over the years, Google has explored many ways that it might use “freshness” as a ranking signal. Back in 2011, we published a popular Moz Blog post about these “Freshness Factors” for SEO. Following our own advice, this is a brand new update of that article.

In 2003, Google engineers filed a patent named Information retrieval based on historical data that shook the SEO world. The patent not only offered insight into the mind of Google engineers at the time, but also seemingly provided a roadmap for Google’s algorithm for years to come.

In his series on the “10 most important search patents of all time,” Bill Slawski’s excellent writeup shows how this patent spawned an entire family of Google child patents–the latest from October 2011.

This post doesn’t attempt to describe all the ways that Google may determine freshness to rank web pages, but instead focuses on areas we may most likely influence through SEO.

Giant, great big caveat: Keep in mind that while multiple Google patent filings describe these techniques — often in great detail — we have no guarantee how Google uses them in its algorithm. While we can't be 100% certain, evidence suggests that they use at least some, and possibly many, of these techniques to rank search results.

1. Freshness by inception date

Initially, a web page can be given a “freshness” score based on its inception date, which decays over time. This freshness score may boost a piece of content for certain search queries, but degrades as the content becomes older.

The inception date is often when Google first becomes aware of the document, such as when Googlebot first indexes a document or discovers a link to it.

"For some queries, older documents may be more favorable than newer ones. As a result, it may be beneficial to adjust the score of a document based on the difference (in age) from the average age of the result set."– All captions from US Patent Document Scoring Based on Document Content Update

2. Amount of change influences freshness: How Much

The age of a webpage or domain isn’t the only freshness factor. Search engines can score regularly updated content for freshness differently from content that doesn’t change. In this case, the amount of change on your webpage plays a role.

For example, changing a single sentence won’t have as big of a freshness impact as a large change to the main body text.

"Also, a document having a relatively large amount of its content updated over time might be scored differently than a document having a relatively small amount of its content updated over time."

In fact, Google may choose to ignore small changes completely. That’s one reason why when I update a link on a page, I typically also update the text surrounding it. This way, Google may be less likely to ignore the change. Consider the following:

"In order to not update every link's freshness from a minor edit of a tiny unrelated part of a document, each updated document may be tested for significant changes (e.g., changes to a large portion of the document or changes to many different portions of the document) and a link's freshness may be updated (or not updated) accordingly."

3. Changes to core content matter more: How important

Changes made in “important” areas of a document will signal freshness differently than changes made in less important content.

Less important content includes:

JavaScript

Comments

Advertisements

Navigation

Boilerplate material

Date/time tags

Conversely, “important” content often means the main body text.

So simply changing out the links in your sidebar, or updating your footer copy, likely won’t be considered as a signal of freshness.

"…content deemed to be unimportant if updated/changed, such as Javascript, comments, advertisements, navigational elements, boilerplate material, or date/time tags, may be given relatively little weight or even ignored altogether when determining UA."

This brings up the issue of timestamps on a page. Some webmasters like to update timestamps regularly — sometimes in an attempt to fake freshness — but there exists conflicting evidence on how well this works. Suffice to say, the freshness signals are likely much stronger when you keep the actual page content itself fresh and updated.

4. The rate of document change: How often

Content that changes more often is scored differently than content that only changes every few years.

For example, consider the homepage of the New York Times, which updates every day and has a high degree of change.

"For example, a document whose content is edited often may be scored differently than a document whose content remains static over time. Also, a document having a relatively large amount of its content updated over time might be scored differently than a document having a relatively small amount of its content updated over time."

Google may treat links from these pages differently as well (more on this below.) For example, a fresh “link of the day” from the Yahoo homepage may be assigned less significance than a link that remains more permanently.

5. New page creation

Instead of revising individual pages, fresh websites often add completely new pages over time. (This is the case with most blogs.) Websites that add new pages at a higher rate may earn a higher freshness score than sites that add content less frequently.

"UA may also be determined as a function of one or more factors, such as the number of 'new' or unique pages associated with a document over a period of time. Another factor might include the ratio of the number of new or unique pages associated with a document over a period of time versus the total number of pages associated with that document."

Some webmasters advocate adding 20–30% new pages to your site every year. Personally, I don’t believe this is necessary as long as you send other freshness signals, including keeping your content up-to-date and regularly earning new links.

6. Rate of new link growth signals freshness

Not all freshness signals are restricted to the page itself. Many external signals can also indicate freshness as well, oftentimes with powerful results.

If a webpage sees an increase in its link growth rate, this could indicate a signal of relevance to search engines. For example, if folks start linking to your personal website because you're about to get married, your site could be deemed more relevant and fresh (as far as this current event goes.)

"…a downward trend in the number or rate of new links (e.g., based on a comparison of the number or rate of new links in a recent time period versus an older time period) over time could signal to search engine 125 that a document is stale, in which case search engine 125 may decrease the document’s score."

Be warned: an unusual increase in linking activity can also indicate spam or manipulative link building techniques. Search engines are likely to devalue such behavior. Natural link growth over time is usually the best bet.

7. Links from fresh sites pass fresh value

Links from sites that have a high freshness score themselves can raise the freshness score of the sites they link to.

For example, if you obtain a link off an old, static site that hasn’t been updated in years, this may not pass the same level of freshness value as a link from a fresh page, i.e. the homepage of Wired. Justin Briggs coined this FreshRank.

"Document S may be considered fresh if n% of the links to S are fresh or if the documents containing forward links to S are considered fresh."

8. Traffic and engagement metrics may signal freshness

When Google presents a list of search results to users, the results the users choose and how much time they spend on each one can be used as an indicator of freshness and relevance.

For example, if users consistently click a search result further down the list, and they spend much more time engaged with that page than the other results, this may mean the result is more fresh and relevant.

"If a document is returned for a certain query and over time, or within a given time window, users spend either more or less time on average on the document given the same or similar query, then this may be used as an indication that the document is fresh or stale, respectively."

You might interpret this to mean that click-through rate is a ranking factor, but that's not necessarily the case. A more nuanced interpretation might say that the increased clicks tell Google there is a hot interest in the topic, and this page — and others like it — happen to match user intent.

For a more detailed explanation of this CTR phenomenon, I highly recommend reading Eric Enge's excellent article about CTR as a ranking factor.

9. Changes in anchor text may devalue links

If the subject of a web page changes dramatically over time, it makes sense that any new anchor text pointing to the page will change as well.

For example, if you buy a domain about racing cars, then change the format to content about baking, over time your new incoming anchor text will shift from cars to cookies.

In this instance, Google might determine that your site has changed so much that the old anchor text is now stale (the opposite of fresh) and devalue those older links entirely.

"The date of appearance/change of the document pointed to by the link may be a good indicator of the freshness of the anchor text based on the theory that good anchor text may go unchanged when a document gets updated if it is still relevant and good."

The lesson here is that if you update a page, don’t deviate too much from the original context or you may risk losing equity from your pre-existing links.

10. Older is often better

Google understands the newest result isn’t always the best. Consider a search query for “Magna Carta." An older, authoritative result may be best here.

In this case, having a well-aged document may actually help you.

Google’s patent suggests they determine the freshness requirement for a query based on the average age of documents returned for the query.

"For some queries, documents with content that has not recently changed may be more favorable than documents with content that has recently changed. As a result, it may be beneficial to adjust the score of a document based on the difference from the average date-of-change of the result set."

A good way to determine this is to simply Google your search term, and gauge the average inception age of the pages returned in the results. If they all appear more than a few years old, a brand-new fresh page may have a hard time competing.

Freshness best practices

The goal here shouldn’t be to update your site simply for the sake of updating it and hoping for better ranking. If this is your practice, you’ll likely be frustrated with a lack of results.

Instead, your goal should be to update your site in a timely manner that benefits users, with an aim of increasing clicks, user engagement, and fresh links. These are the clearest signals you can pass to Google to show that your site is fresh and deserving of high rankings.

Aside from updating older content, other best practices include:

Create new content regularly.

When updating, focus on core content, and not unimportant boilerplate material.

Keep in mind that small changes may be ignored. If you’re going to update a link, you may consider updating all the text around the link.

All other things being equal, links from fresher pages likely pass more value than links from stale pages.

Engagement metrics are your friend. Work to increase clicks and user satisfaction.

If you change the topic of a page too much, older links to the page may lose value.

Updating older content works amazingly well when you also earn fresh links to the content. A perfect example of this is when Geoff Kenyon updated his Technical Site Audit Checklist post on Moz. You can see the before and after results below:

In my opinion, the "freshness factor" is one of the reasons, why Wikipedia works so very well.

They have one URL per topic that never changes. But the content on that page is updated regularly.

For example: A news magazine will probably add a new article about WW2 every time there is an anniversary or something to report. Wikipedia on the other hand, has one page with all the information:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II

Therefore, if somebody is searching for "World War 2" in general, it is much better from googles point of view to show them the one page with all the information, than any article that only looks at a facet of the topic.

Moreover, of course, all the ranking signals are combined in this one URL, too, and not diluted across many Pages.

In the case of Wikipedia the "freshness factor" might win from that but i'd tip more towards the "trust factor". People just happen to know what they will find if they search a term and see wikipedia link, and are more likely to click there than any random website.

In my case i even type my terms with the keyword wikipedia at the end to make sure i find the wikipedia page which in result will raise the score of that keyword for wikipedia.

Interesting that you chose to make a new article instead of updating the old article (still at https://moz.com/blog/google-fresh-factor) although you actually introduced the new article as a "brand new update of that article".

Normally, it's best to update content using the same URL. That way you avoid the ~15% equity loss when migrating URLs through a 301

Updating blog posts can be a bit different, depending on your CMS. In our case, we need the updated post to appear as a "new" post in order to appear in our RSS stream, and our older CMS isn't very flexible this way.

Regardless, the old post is now 301'd to this one. It will be interresting to see how traffic moves over the next several weeks.

The Moz Blog has it's specific eccentricities, but almost any platform you publish on is going to have differences between updating an old post (old URL) and publishing a new post. For example, updating an old post may or may not cause it to rise to the top of category pages/RSS feeds, which are often counted as links.

Overall, all things being equal, it's almost always better to stick with the same URL. In real life, things aren't always this equal.

Great post, I've seen this work on our website with some question related searches. We had a video on the page that was quite good, with a transcription and slowly as time went by the page dropped a little in rankings. I went to the page and updated it with some text based information (a fair amount), above the video and it jumped straight back up. Well worth going back and updating old content with useful information and links.

Thank you for pointing out "When the query deserves freshness". I've been arguing that about "fresh" content for years.

Query Categories of information that deserve freshness: News, Product Pricing, Transportation Schedules, Traffic, Weather -- I'm sure this isn't an all inclusive list of categories, but if your website's topic doesn't fall within this arena, your time may better be spent not regurgitating fresh content all over your website.

This is a great read and something that everyone can adopt into their current marketing strategy. Prior to reading this I was with the create new content on a regular basis to keep the freshness of the site up, but you pointed out some great concepts. Changing the text around a link change was an awesome standout for me, and also all the freshness best practices were amazing. All in all I think the biggest take away from this is that have the goal of best serving your visitors in terms of quality content that is up to date and relevant to the common visitor to the site, and by doing that you will need to follow all the best practices you mentioned here.

I will be bookmarking this and sharing with my team at work for sure thank you for this great contribution.

To add a little more context, I've experimented with this quite a bit over the years and I almost always get better results when I update the entire paragraph surrounding the link.

Additionally, depending on the page, it helps to check if you can make any additional updates to the page to make the link more contextually relevant.

For example, if your link contains the word "coupons" - is the linking page really about coupons? Can it/should it be? Perhaps by tweaking the title tag+headers+body text you can make the page more relevant to your keywords, which may help passing topic-weighted PageRank.

When you do change pages to reflect changes in the law it may be worth resubmitting them so Google recognises the freshness of the (updated) page. If you wait till Google crawls the page you may not benefit from the freshness of your update.

Cyrus, do you think that a site that is updated regularly with quality blog posts -- about topics that may not "likely require fresh content -- will have improved rankings over a site without regularly updated blog posts? For example, let's say there were two dentist websites. Equal DA, equal age, equal site speed, quality of content, citation consistency, etc. In your opinion, would having fresh blog posts published from that site influence the rankings of the rest of the pages on the site?

The reason only has partially to do with freshness, however. The new posts do give the freshness signals, but they also provide additional contextual relevancy to the domain and new internal links. In the case that posts receive links and social shares (this should be a goal) then the signals are boosted through the atmosphere.

Excellent question, and I'm not sure I have a satisfactory answer. RankBrain focuses on query understanding, so in the larger sense and averaged across all sites, it shouldn't make much of a difference. In individual cases however, I imagine times when query understanding means a different result is ranked that doesn't follow traditional fresh/not fresh ranking signals.

TL;DR It's possible, but not something you likely need to worry about. (and you couldn't do anything about it if you wanted to)

Google has confirmed that "freshness" is sometimes a ranking signal but there are many search terms where it is clearly not used.

Surely the most important issues for discussion on this topic should be:

a. When does "freshness" becomes an important signal?b. Is it even worth targeting referrals from such transient search terms?

For around 20 years, I've mostly worked with small business websites. I can't think of a situation where "freshness" was an important or cost-effective ranking factor for any of them.

I don't see your "magna carta Taylor Swift" page example in my top 100 SERPs. Google is not perfect and it seems possible your example may have been a temporary ranking aberration perhaps based on a freshness need for "Taylor Swift" searches.

The point is, why would we want to target search terms with transient rankings? If G throws up irrelevant transient ranking results, the user is likely to search again but with a revised query. At which point, "freshness" factors are likely to be less significant.

It seems to me SEO tactics aimed at chasing transient, "freshness" related terms are likely ripping off the client.

It also seems to me that location has become a far more important ranking signal than content freshness. I live in Sydney, Australia. If I search for your example, "bus schedule" all top 10 SERPs are for pages of bus websites in Sydney. In fact, 6 of the top 10 are for bus site pages that are specific to my small area of Sydney. "Freshness" has absolutely no discernible impact on this search term.

Searches for almost every trade, service or product are obviously impacted by the location of the searcher and the website. I defy anyone to find much value in content "freshness" for all of these search types.

Google is getting smarter day by day and it has powerful algorithms to make major changes to provide most relevant results. Google’s main focus is user satisfaction so it prefers user oriented website.You can get many visitors for once without adding fresh content & you will go to lose traffic & rankings also. Fresh content is the most powerful option to attract visitors & keep them in touch.

If you want instant & long term benefits then the fresh content is the best & ethical way.

Interesting note: "Websites that add new pages at a higher rate may earn a higher freshness score than sites that add content less frequently." I think this makes sense as long as the content being added is relevant, useful, and provides unique value of course.

I also hadn't considered the point about updating the text surrounding an updated link. That's a good point especially when working on updating existing content on client's sites and making sure internal links are being used properly.

Didn't get your point of frequently changing in titles may effect rankings. Does it means the from cooking site to a law site, that title change will impact or if i change my law site existing titles with the law site related (variants) new titles.?

Changing titles happens a lot, and in many cases can increase your rankings. The cases where you risk decreasing your rankings are often when you change the title a degree that's much less contextually relevant to the incoming anchor text.

So within a law blog, even there it depends on the amount of change, i.e.

A few thoughts. Keep in mind when I gave my example above about DUI lawyers above, I was talking about how changing title tags that deviate from older anchor text can lead to a drop in rankings. Might of been a bad example but I didn't mean to imply that this query was one that "deserved freshness" i.e. newer results in search.

In this case:

• The phrase "Divorce Lawyer" likely doesn't deserve freshness as much as a term like "Divorce Law 2016" - so the freshness portion of the ranking weighting is likely smaller.

• Freshness in many cases won't outweigh the hundreds of other signals used in the algorithm. In fact, we know the top 3 ranking factors (out of over 200) are links, content, and RankBrain, so in most cases freshness is going to be less influential than these factors.

• Finally, I think it's best to think of freshness as a way to improve the ranking of your own content from where it was, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to outrank everyone else. For example, if by "freshening" your content you may move from position 15 to position 10, but the results above you may all still be older (because of links and other signals)

Thanks for the quick reply Cyrus,Do I infer from it that the first step needs to be an assessment of whether "freshness" is likely to be a significant ranking signal?

Is this a likely list of search terms where "freshness" is NOT useful?

The 25% of all searches that Google says have a local intent

Any company or brand name searches

Business category or sub-category searches

Service category or sub-category searches

Product category or sub-category searches

Application searches of all the above

Problems solved by all of the above

Any location word containing search term

That seems to cull out most of the searches relevant to my types of clients.

What sort of search terms are left?

Job searches

News searches

Entertainers/entertainment searches

Fact searches

Forget the last one, G scrapes the answers from other people's pages to deliver most of these.

Am I missing some big search categories where "freshness" may be significant?

PS A search for "divorce law" gets me a bunch of Au law pages so it seems my location is overriding any "freshness" signal. If I search for "divorce law 2016" I'm getting world-wide pages that are clearly using ranking factors for the word "2016" to jump up the list. Can't see "freshness" in this one either. :)Regs, John

Here are the articles I love MOZ, here you can learn about the promotion, optimization and search engines, more than the largest companies in the world in the field of Internet marketing, thanks for the article, very useful for me. And my special thanks for your recommendations needs to be fresh. Be relevant. Most importantly, to be useful.

Hello Cyrus, great article but i have a doubt after you mention about the homepage of the New York Times . That i'm working on a site related to Ayurveda and the homepage is not updated regularly because it is a simple page with just a small detail. but we have a blog which update regularly. Will google take this as a factor

Some of my articles are very seasonal because they deal with tax issues I write about every year. Sometimes I do a 301 redirect to a new post and othertimes I simply rewrite the post with the updates to avoid duplicate content and get articles with more authority.

Great! This is really helpful. I have been wondering how to update the content of a blog with more than 1,000 pages and keep the good inbound links at the same time. Many old posts might be "refurbished" by adding fresh content. Thank you

Typically, simply updating the article with significant changes is more than helpful, without changing the the published date. That said, there are sometimes legitimate reasons to alter the publish date. Best use your own judgement depending on the situation.

Thanks Cyrus for the post. This definitely affirms what I’ve seen happen to some of my client pages when content became stale and ranking for the page started slipping. By adding newer and more relevant content, there was an improvement in the ranking to a better spot in the SEPs. I think this plus some amplification of the revised content surly does help with ranking. The 7 best practices for updating older content are certainly helpful.

One of the best article on fresh content topics. Just one thing, The statement "All other things being equal, links from fresher pages likely pass more value than links from stale pages" actually challenges the long term belief of many that a link from high PA (which only develops mostly when page is old) is a good link.

In our case we have built a free mobile app which got very popular over the last years and now 90% of our incoming anchor links contain the name of the mobile app. While the app is topically losely related to the grand scheme of our site, the keywords in the app name are not.

May we and other people building popular supplementary content to their site therefore need to be concerned that links to their "money / core" content pages may get devalued if great majority of incoming links suddenly go to one supplementary piece of content? So may building great and popular supplemenatary content actually harm us? Any advice for these cases?

Google turned this up as a recommended card on my phone, so it's working for you :) I've noticed this with my own business blog, where one particular post which is weeks old draws more traffic than more recent ones.

Say one of the hotels or schools in the top 10 drops and a new hotel comes up on the listings page, would that be considered a minor update or would do you reckon that's considered as part of the overall content update which is 'major'?

Call me old school but I honestly believe that content is king!... I recently changed the entire content on Payday Pixie and almost immediately experienced an increase in traffic. I think one of the best areas for any website to invest in is the regular creation of content through an onsite blog. However blogging is also one of the most time consuming and difficult aspects of SEO as it is easy to take your foot off the gas and neglect this side of online marketing. Many of the clients i work with seem to revert to typical email marketing as opposed to persisting with regular blog posts and content creation to help them rank higher in the long term.

Our business is travel and specifically vacation rental lodging, so long tail qualifiers are very seasonal. For example, in mountain regions, "ski in/ski out" peaks in fall/winter and then completely disappears in the spring/summer. Your post has given me an idea to test seasonal updates to the category description copy for our ecommerce category pages (city/destination landing pages) to include seasonal topics and see if it impacts our rankings, both seasonally but also year round due to consistent "freshness". Same goes for events: I'm thinking we'll test updating the category copy to include upcoming local events. We would also match page titles and H1s with the primary seasonal qualifiers.

The goal would be to see rank boosts by keeping our copy "fresh", but not strictly for the sake of SEO. As you say, "The goal here shouldn’t be to update your site simply for the sake of updating it and hoping for better ranking. If this is your practice, you’ll likely be frustrated with a lack of results." I don't want to strictly update copy flippantly to hope for a freshness boost, but rather provide relevant updates for the user and perhaps as a bonus receive some affirmation from Google that we have relevant, fresh content that should be rewarded with better rankings. We'll a/b test and see what we find. Here's to hoping! Thanks for the great post. My wheels are certainly turning.

Hereere is a question. What about extending the length of your index page? Instead of adding a new page, what about appending to your index page? The content on my index page are individuals articles where I did just that; I appended to the page.

Agree with post. Also,when we publish new content, our present yet more opportunities for our site to contain more keywords. Keywords are high on the algorithm chart for search engine indexing and ranking. Frequently added content, such as blog or article postings, allows us to optimize the article with pertinent keywords that can attract visitors to our site..Kudos :)

I'm having some keywords that are ranking on page 2, but the content for these keywords are not good enough. The problem here is that it's hard to add more content to the existing articles. So I'm thinking of doing a 301 redirect to a new post. Or just simply deleting the existing and replacing it with new content.

Great analysis, I have always believed that fresh content is best for Google but after reading and going through images it just gave me clear picture of how it happens, but I have a query if you can answer that, I agree content is king but what if we don't do link building for content or what if we don't get backlinks ? will our ranks will still be on Top ? I am asking this since I have a blog which I am regularly updating but not doing link building yet. Your guidance will certainly be great help.

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